Category: Club News

This option is used to create news items for the home page or dedicated news page of your site. News items will be displayed below the welcome message in chronological order or on the dedicated news page if this feature is enabled. That is, the most recently dated messages will be at the top of the page. This is the best place to post things relevant to your entire organization and to the general public as well. You can also use news messages to broadcast their content to your entire email-enabled membership. This is a great way to get the word out on important or timely matters of concern to everyone.

Author

This field is used to identify the author of the message. You should type your real name here so that readers of your message can identify you.

Email Address

Enter your email address in this field so that readers will be able to click on your name to send you email regarding your message. This should be of the form: yourname@email.com.

Publish date

This field will be filled in automatically with today's date whenever you create a message. You can change this to a date in the future if you'd like to hide the message until that date. Enter any date you wish as long as it is in the correct format: "MM/DD/YYYY."

Expiration date

This field specifies the date after which the message will no longer be displayed. It is important that messages expire after a reasonable amount of time so that the bulletin board or swap shop areas don't become too crowded with obsolete information. It's also not good to have a listing for an event that's already over or items that were long ago sold.

The default for this field is 15 days from today's date, but you should use a shorter period of time if you can or know when the information will be out of date. For instance, when announcing an upcoming event you should use its date as the expiration date. As above, dates should be in the format: "MM-DD-YYYY" or "MM/DD/YYYY."

Archive
Once a news items expires it will be removed from your site 15 days after the expiration date. To prevent the news item from being deleted from your site and maintaining the expired state of the message, choose to Archive the message. The message will remain expired but will not be removed from your site. This will allow you to use this message again in the future by changing the posting and expiration date, and unchecking the Archive option.

Title

This is the headline for your message. This should be something "catchy" and to the point. Overly long titles may not fit in the display window and are often overlooked by readers. In any case, titles longer that 64 characters will be truncated.

Message

This is where you type the body of the message you want displayed to readers. It can be any type of free-form text you wish.

Featured Image

You can specify a picture file (.gif or .jpg) on your computer to upload and display with your message. Press the "Browse" button to find the file on your computer or type its full path and name. If a file has already been uploaded for this message, the check box can be used to turn the picture's display either on (checked) or off. Note that images wider than 310 pixels will be truncated to that width. Pictures taller than 400 pixels will be reduced to that height.

Note: If you have enabled the News Slideshow in your Welcome Message, it is highly recommended that you upload a featured image for each news item.

Image Caption

Enter a caption for the photo you uploaded above. This can be any text you like up to 255 characters in length.

Picture Slideshow

Use the picture slideshow option to showcase pictures in your photo albums or team picture albums within any news item or on the welcome message of your homepage. When selected, the picture slideshow will place the pictures in the album you've selected into a moving gallery. You can select to show the images on Top or Below the text in the message, and choose which album to pull the images from. For example, if you are writing an article about the great tournament your teams just played in, you might create a photo album of the tournament pictures and choose this album to display within the news item. The picture slideshow will show the first 30 pictures in your album.

From Album - Select the album you want to pull pictures from

Or Team - Or you can select a Team's pictures to use

Broadcast this message

Check this box to have an email copy of your message sent out via email. If this is a News or Exchange item, it will be sent to all members who have an email address. If this is a Team Bulletin, it will be sent to all members of the specified team(s) and their parents.

If this is a news item, you can choose to send it to only club members who are currently assigned to a team (and their parents) or to all members. If you choose the second option, all members will receive the message regardless of whether or not they are still active. The first choice is more appropriate for organizations that have operated for more than one year and have members on file who are no longer active. You can choose which team seasons to broadcast to by selecting from the season menu below. When you choose team seasons in this way, only members of teams whose seasons are selected will receive the message. This way, only the appropriate people will receive the message.

Send Time

Optionally, you can also enter a time (HH:MM AM). When this is entered and you have selected the Broadcast option a broadcast message will be sent at that time. For example, you may want to post a news item tomorrow and let people know about it. Set the Publish Date to tomorrow and the Publish Time to 09:00 AM and at 9:00 AM tomorrow a message will be sent out to your users letting them know this message has been posted.